Andrew Reid PhD

In the movie Limitless, Bradley Cooper stars as a down-and-out writer who happens across a superdrug that miraculously heightens his cognitive abilities, including memory recall, creativity, language acquisition, and action planning. It apparently also makes his eyes glow with an unnerving and implausible intensity. In this blog entry, I explore this intriguing possibility from a neuroscientific perspective.

Exaptation refers to the tendency across evolution to recycle existing mechanisms for new and more complex functions. By analogy, this is likely how episodic memory — and indeed many of our higher level neural processes — evolved from more basic functions such as spatial navigation. Here I explore these ideas in light of the current evidence.